


graft and corrosives

by handschuhmaus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 05:56:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20204824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: This is a little more like a Sith plot than a purely Jedi plan, and a lot more like a Jedi campaign on the outside than what the Sith would come up with.Did someone say they wanted a revolution?





	graft and corrosives

**Author's Note:**

> <strike>Agh! Turns out I hit the wrong button and posted instead of saving a snippet to drafts. (why this was originally mis-/minimally categorized and back dated)</strike> buuut you now get a proper first chapter...
> 
> the prompt, though it came out of my own head for a rather different context*, and doesn't really play out, was "I want you to die, but I don't want _you_ to die"
> 
> The title is a [partially bilingual] triple entendre:
> 
> "Graft and corruption" being a stock English phrase for the activities of politicians who serve certain special interests excessively, at the exclusion of their constituents.
> 
> "Graft" also refers to the process of attaching parts of mostly plants (but also eg human skin) to another plant (body part for skin) of the same or similar type, so that they grow together and the part--branch or bud etc.--lives despite separation from its original parent plant. (Corrosives are, of course, certain chemicals, such as acids, which "eat through"--react with--common materials)
> 
> Finally, "Graf" is the German equivalent of the title "Count", and so Dooku's title in German language material.
> 
> *not my own sentiment, but ascribed to a character in a war context where they were approaching friendship with an enemy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the full usual quote, of course, is "Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein" (from Nietzsche)--Who fights with monstrosities might watch that he does not thereby become a monstrosity. And if you look long in an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Dooku had said before the Jedi wouldn't approve of his spending the evening drinking with a senator friend, but on reflection Palpatine considered this overly critical: this routine involved one, perhaps two, drinks each and the alcohol in as many glasses of wine (or other beverages, but by drinks he did not mean highly alcoholic mixed drinks) was just enough to reach a state of talkative, mild euphoria. And thankfully for his tolerance, being tipsy made Dooku reflective.

What the Jedi was talking of this evening went round and round in circles--first it was that his disapproval of certain directions of the Council had set him researching the Sith (and this did, in fact, give Sidious certain trepidations, but not enough to break off their relationship or even indicate less than interest in the topic: he _was_ very interested in how his enemies viewed him, even if Dooku was not quite enemy from his side), which in turn made him nostalgic for an era he had not known but also fed into said disapproval, but then he couldn't sympathize with the _Sith_, surely?

Palpatine was reminded of the philosophical offering about those who went round looking into abyssal depths. 

It was clear and obvious that Dooku was fascinated with the Sith as he had been, although they took on a forbidden quality for the Jedi which had never been the case on Naboo, outside of the cloistered halls.

"Forgive me, my friend, I go too far," the Serennoan admitted ruefully, at the end of an anecdote about Bane (from the Jedi perspective, naturally), related with the implicit intention of drawing analogies between himself and Bane: who but a monster, who but an ideologue, would destroy a society to rebuild it with his own vision?

"Must it be so absolute?" Palpatine said absently, swirling the last of his drink in his glass.

Dooku sighed. "To hear the Jedi talk, the Sith are as antithetical to us as antimatter, but it is on account of their characteristics, not ours."

"You've just told me of this ...Bane" (he feigned unfamiliarity with the name) "who remade the Sith? I thought"--although that was too strong a word to be truthful; in actuality this was what Palpatine had been told on Coruscant or by those of his countrymen who had spent time here on the capital planet, and seemed to be popular opinion--"the Jedi believed in redemption?"

His Jedi friend exhaled forcefully. "The Sith would never remake themselves in a form that did not oppose the Jedi." But the comment took the form of a learned property, a secondhand fact, rather than his own assessment of the topic.

"_If_ you don't mind my playing devil's advocate"--what better role for House Palpatine, and yet Sidious was advancing onto shaky ground with the idea--"is it possible that such a tactic is prohibited by the Jedi's attitude? I take what you have said, and what I have heard elsewhere, to suggest that the Jedi are just as loathe to give the Sith any grounds for existence."

"It is written that the Sith exist solely for purpose of bringing the galaxy under their dominion and thus cannot tolerate the Jedi!" Dooku said with sudden vehemence. But then he sighed. "Perhaps you are right, friend Palpatine, and the viewpoint taken by the Order is too absolute. Such are their morals, but in the living of my not insignificant years, I have found an unyielding morality little suited for the realities of life.

"And it is not as if, in practice, they apply those ideals so perfectly! It becomes 'necessary death', 'expedient attachment', 'inconvenient compassion', that knights are condemned or lauded by, contrary to the supposed nature of the act."

"...are Jedi knights ever encouraged to judge for themselves on moral matters?" Palpatine asked. It seemed an innocent question, but even as he said it, he realized it would needle Dooku on precisely the topic he had just taken up.

Indeed, Dooku swallowed hard, and looked to the wine bottle, not yet emptied but at a sidetable on _ Palpatine's_ side of the sofa, as a distraction. "...no, I think strictly speaking, we are not meant to," he replied, toying with his empty glass, "but it depends on the Master how much leeway Padawans are given."

"You?" Palpatine asked curiously, and not without the thought that Damask had been an odd mixture on the topic, offering authoritative absolutes, invitations to rationality, and theories grounded with falsifiability (as something of a scientist) in turn.

"Did I tell you Grandmaster Yoda trained me?" Dooku asked, with a regretful note. "He is so old and so respected that my questioning him was almost unthinkable. But if you mean as a master--Qui-Gon Jinn particularly is so curious an individual, and I against the model set by Yoda feel so fallible, that I could not pretend to have all the answers."

There was a pause, which Dooku did not resume talking to fill, and then Palpatine asked the hazardous question, "_Do_ you wish then that the Sith still existed, as an opponent against which the Jedi might be honed?"

The Jedi combed his fingers through greying hair. "I don't know, Senator. I do have a taste for battles of words and wits and skill, but it is not in my character to crave for the spilling of blood, which always seems to accompany the Sith. 

"Then again--perhaps part of that is perspective. There is little reason for them to paint the Sith in a truly fair light, since Jedi were finally victorious, aided in large part by Bane, and yes, because of enmity, their viewpoint historically was dogged by battles." Dooku leaned back and stared up at the uninteresting (and presently poorly lit) ceiling of Palpatine's living room.

After a moment, he added, "There was...the legend of Revan."

"Revan?" Palpatine asked. What few recorded accounts he had found seemed untrustworthy, and Plagueis was cagey on the topic, on the few occasions he dared bring it up.

"Sith, then Jedi, then fallen again, as I recall, but I remember no further specifics," he said with some regret, then yawned. "Imagine if I became a Sith, Senator."

_That_ certainly hadn't been anything Palpatine was expecting him to say! Nor had Sidious a ready reply to it. Dooku, a Sith? It was, in some regards, a tempting thought (perhaps saber dueling would be more enjoyable with an opponent who liked it--and he did not deceive himself with thinking Dooku had much to learn from him in that department, but there could still be a few exchanges of technique to be had), yet, in the context, a very messy one, if Yan Dooku were to try to reconstruct the Sith precepts from Jedi records. "You've gone from wishing you could fight them to proposing being one." he managed to get out. 

"Perhaps you were right, Palpatine. I struggle to accept the moral decay in concert with the melee of voices saying this thing or that one is unassailably righteous or else damningly dark. With no one aim, the Jedi have become ...messy," although he seemed to question the description even as he said it. "No--not 'messy', but...they wander, ignoring the prospect of the actually messy problems around them. I wish...But _I_ could not lead them..."

And, at the end of all that dancing around the Sith question, Jedi Master Dooku had, unwittingly, put a thought in Palpatine's head. A foolish one, no doubt: it was not the nature of the Sith to ...take on such lengthy and Sisyphean projects, except that that _was_ the very nature of the Grand Plan, a long and relentlessly upward game.

A game that pointed, he saw now, at an extremely unstable end, when the nature of things was downward, and towards chaos. Oh, yes, certainly, Sidious would never claim it was not of the Sith to thrive on chaos, to turn it to their own aims. At the same time, if he _did_ push things to their culmination a few years, a few decades down the way, it would go back to Bane's gambit--how to wrest power into the hands of the relatively tidy few, when there were so many, many loose ends wont to pop up.

It was impossible to force the Jedi to accept that not all would acquiesce to their supposedly benevolent reign, to accept the existence of what they considered evil. But Palpatine, except in the most dire of corners, was better suited to guile than force.

It was completely improbable that the Jedi would ever abdicate their power and exclusivity. Currently in Sidious' bag of tricks towards the scenario were only a single potential Jedi ally out of thousands, and the notion that _his_ former apprentice--er, padawan was shaping up to be an inconveniently model Jedi, in the sense that he, for instance, defined compassion for himself, and not by reference to Grandmaster Yoda. 

Very slim pickings, but if Dooku did, approximately, emulate Bane, create a Jedi schism, at least...

_Would Palpatine, at seventeen, have been satisfied with emancipation? The cause of his misery removed but still existent, no revenge on Cosinga but no great unquestionably crime hanging over his head._ Because that question seemed very relevant to whether Sidious could ever learn to tolerate a Jedi Order, even defanged.

"I should go," Dooku said wearily, placing the glass on his own sidetable with a clumsy hand.

"Yan," Palpatine corrected, suddenly the consummate host with all the turmoil of Sidious's idea, his double identity, the unwelcome past buried below a placid surface "you should stay. Yes, I know you haven't imbibed to excess, but tipsy and exhausted is a risky combination, and I cannot let you drive home like this." 

As if on cue, though entirely unanticipated, fat drops spattered the slanted panes of his apartment window, and thunder roared. The planetary weather authority tried to avoid letting such storms build up in the Senate district, but it seemed sometimes it couldn't be helped. "And the weather sounds terrible. I have a perfectly nice guest room."

Dooku looked at him sideways, through a pained expression. "I suppose it's only sensible," he allowed, and made his way towards the fresher and bedrooms, stumbling a little with his tiredness and long time seated.


End file.
